He was a lecturer in German at Westfield College London (1974–1991) and was awarded a personal chair at Queen Mary and Westfield College London (1991–1994). He was professor of German and head of department at King’s College London (1994–2004), Deputy Head and then Associate Head of the School of Humanities at King's College London in 2002-2004. He was also on the Senate of the University of London from 2000-2004. He was a council member of the
Poetry Society (1973–1977) and a member of the Bielefeld Colloquium für neue Poesie (1979–2003). He was awarded the Goethe Prize of the English Goethe Society (1977) and a Stipend of the
Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (1979, 1985, 1990). He was a joint honorary secretary of the English Goethe Society (1986–2004) and has been a member of the council of the English Goethe Society since 1973. He was also a council member of the International Goethe Society (1995–2003). For ten years he was founding chairman of the
Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust (1996–2006). He was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin (1985–1986; 2012). Since 1989 he was a member of the Austrian PEN-Club. In 2005 he was elected a corresponding member of the German Academy of Language and Literature. He is a member of the Academic Council of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift and of the Triglav Circle. His English biography of Goethe was voted the best book on Goethe in The Five Books by David Wellbery (2024) and the expanded German edition was voted book of the month by ''
Die Welt'. His edition of David Rousset's memoir on
The Concentrationary Universe was voted a
'Spiegel'' bestseller. He has also been engaged politically, e.g. reporting on Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1989, or in his critique of the new edition of
Mein Kampf in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2016 and the Open Letter he organised to the European Heads of State, also in 2016. He has written widely on Brexit and the future of Europe in the German-speaking press publishing in
Süddeutsche Zeitung,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
Die Welt and
Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Two editions of his
Voices from Ukraine were published online in the journal
Central Europe in 2022. As a poet, he has been active on the literary scene since the 1960s, initially writing experimental poetry in the circle connected with the Poetry Society. He published alongside experimentalists like
Bob Cobbing, Cris Cheek,
Lawrence Upton and
Bill Griffiths, bringing out over a dozen poetry books and pamphlets. He has been represented in numerous exhibitions, such as
Sprachen jenseits von Dichtung (1979),
[The Open and Closed Book] at the Victoria and Albert Museum and
[Vom Aussehen der Woerter] at the Kunstmuseum Hannover, and in anthologies such as
Typewriter Art (2014) and
A Human Document (2014). This side of his work – poetry, drawings, artists' books – is represented in many major collections including the
Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), the
New York Public Library, the Sackner Archive (Florida), the
Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Special Collection, Maughan Library, King's College London, the
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Department of Prints and Drawings,
British Museum (London) and
Tate Britain. He held a retrospective of his drawings and concrete poems at the National Library of Czechoslovakia, Prague, in 1997. Poems of his have been set to music by
Gerhard Lampersberg and
Wolfgang Florey. His translations of poems by
August Stramm have also been set to music by
Michael Nyman in
War Works (2014). His novel
The Magus of Portobello Road appeared in 2015. His second novel
A Night at the Troubadour came out in 2017. His third novel
Coriander Bowman's Party was published in 2021. Since the 1980s he has regularly produced literary journalism, writing for
The Times,
The Guardian,
The Independent,
The European and
The New York Times as well as for the
London Review of Books. He is a regular contributor to the
Times Literary Supplement. His work has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, Italian, and Japanese. Adler received an Honorary Silver Medal of Jan Masaryk at the Czech Republic Ambassador's residence in London in November 2019. ==Scholarly books, editions, translations==